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1984

George Orwell's 1984, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Nazi Germany, and Stalin ruled Russia can all be related to Walker Percy's essay, The Loss of the Creature. In the book 1984 the world is run by a brainwashing committee called the Party. In Brave New World everybody is conditioned, from the time they are artificially conceived, to perform specific tasks and believe specific ideas. Nazi Germany was run by Adolf Hitler who took control of Germany with brainwashing propaganda, with some specifically trained on the youth of Germany (Heyes pg 17). Stalin also used propaganda to brainwash, or at least terrify people into cooperating with him (encarta.com). In Percy's essay he speaks of a planner and a consumer; the planner being the one radiating the ideas and the consumer being the one to either accept or reject those ideas based on what they choose to believe. The Party, Big Brother, or whomever the government leader is, could be considered the planner, while the people of the ruled nation would be considered the consumer. In the cases of these four governments almost every person always accepted and never rejected whatever ideas or facts the leader put forth because they had been brainwashed either since the leader came to power or since the time they were born. There are always a few exceptions, people that personify Percy's thesis which is “...the person is not something one can study and provide for; he is something one struggles for. But unless he knows that there is a struggle, he is going to be just what the planner thinks he is," (Bartholomae & Petrosky, 577). The rest of the general public does exactly the opposite and Orwell, Huxley, and history show why this could be a very dangerous thing.
One of the things Percy writes in his essay is almost exactly like the new world in 1984; Percy states, "...the person is not something one can study and provide for; he is something one struggles for. But unless he knows that ther...